Search Results (424)

Phosphogypsum (PG) governance is a persistent challenge in industrial solid waste management, particularly in regions where large-scale stockpiling, uneven resource-utilization capacity, and policy implementation pressures coexist. Existing studies have paid considerable attention to regulatory instruments and recycling technologies, but less is known about how governments, waste-generating enterprises, and waste-utilizing enterprises adjust their strategies under bounded rationality. This study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model incorporating prospect theory. The technology–organization–environment (TOE) perspective is used as a parameter-identification lens to capture three external conditions: policy incentive intensity, enterprise governance input, and resource-utilization technology maturity. Based on case-informed parameter calibration from Guizhou and related policy-industrial evidence, numerical simulations are conducted to examine evolutionary paths, equilibrium conditions, and parameter sensitivity. The results show that PG governance may evolve from systemic inaction to policy-driven transformation and then to market-oriented sustainability. Technological maturity plays a threshold role, while excessive loss aversion can destabilize cooperative evolution. The interaction analysis further indicates that policy incentives are effective only when they are aligned with enterprise treatment behavior and viable market-entry conditions. These findings suggest that PG governance should move beyond short-term administrative intervention toward staged policy support, technical standardization, and market cultivation. Full article

Stable discrimination can coexist with unreliable probabilities, abstention policies, and uncertainty sets under distribution shift. We evaluate this mismatch with CRIT-AID, an executable multi-domain reliability-audit framework that separates model fitting, probability calibration, operating-rule calibration, and testing and then transports source-derived rules unchanged to target domains. Across four public tabular domains, stable discrimination did not imply stable probability quality, selective operating points, or conformal uncertainty. On identical ACS 2024 records, changing the income target definition left AUROC nearly unchanged, while ECE differed by 0.083; prevalence-intercept alignment reduced this difference to −0.004, showing that target semantics can alter probability reliability without materially changing ranking. Across 27 primary 90% conformal conditions, label-conditional calibration improved worst-class coverage in 18 but worsened it in 9 and usually increased prediction-set size. LightGBM sensitivity changed absolute discrimination without removing the mismatch among reliability dimensions. These findings show that discrimination alone is insufficient evidence for reliable AI decision support: audits should test the transportability of probability mappings, operating rules, class-specific validity, and uncertainty informativeness when deployment conditions or target meanings change. Full article

Climate risk has become a defining challenge for businesses, influencing strategic decision-making, organisational resilience, and long-term performance. Despite the rapid growth of research in this area, the intellectual development and thematic evolution of climate-related corporate studies remain fragmented. This study provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature through a bibliometric analysis and systematic review of 643 Scopus-indexed, peer-reviewed articles published between 1993 and 2025, with a systematic thematic synthesis of 23 empirical studies. Using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer, science-mapping techniques, including co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling, were employed to examine publication trends, intellectual foundations, and major research themes. The findings indicate a shift from environmental measurement and compliance toward climate-risk management, carbon disclosure, and sustainable finance. Financial outcomes are heterogeneous, and context-dependent carbon exposure is generally associated with valuation penalties and downside risk, while the relevance of disclosure and climate strategies depends on credibility, substantive implementation, and organisational and institutional conditions. The integrated review shows that the financial implications of climate-related corporate actions are contingent upon climate-risk exposure, disclosure credibility, organisational capabilities, and institutional context. It further explains the coexistence of mixed empirical findings and identifies priorities for future research and policy. The findings offer valuable implications for researchers, corporate managers, investors, and policymakers seeking to strengthen sustainable business practices under an evolving climate risk landscape. Full article

Brazil presents a distinctive convergence of continental-scale climatic diversity, extensive urbanization, large-scale biomass burning, rapid land-use change, persistent air-quality monitoring gaps, and deep social inequalities, producing highly heterogeneous and compound environmental health risks. In this context, treating air pollution and climate change as parallel environmental crises obscures their structural interconnections through shared emission sources, mutually reinforcing exposure pathways, and overlapping health and social consequences. In this narrative review, we critically synthesize scientific and institutional lines of evidence and argue that air pollution and climate risks can be more effectively addressed in Brazil through a single strategic agenda for science, public health, and governance. We first discuss why these challenges cannot be managed in isolation, emphasizing the effects of heat, drought, stagnation events, biomass burning, and extreme weather on pollutant formation, dispersion, and health burden. We then examine Brazil as a critical case where recent regulatory advances coexist with structural limitations in monitoring, data integration, and territorial coverage. Based on this diagnosis, we propose an integrated national agenda organized around five mutually reinforcing priorities: monitoring through hybrid networks; predictive science through climate-informed modeling and early warning; public health through the convergence of epidemiology, toxicology, and mechanistic research; equity-oriented research and action through the explicit incorporation of vulnerability, inequality, and climate justice; and policy appraisal through the assessment of disease burden, economic costs, mitigation co-benefits, and trade-offs. We further discuss the governance mechanisms needed to connect these priorities and translate evidence into coordinated action and adaptive public policies. We also argue that the Amazon should be approached not as an isolated ecological exception but as a central component of a broader Brazilian and Global South discussion on environmental health, land-use change, and climate justice. In this scenario, Brazil has the scientific capacity and regulatory momentum to become a reference in the integrated management of air pollution and climate risks, but this will depend on replacing fragmented approaches with a coordinated framework capable of linking exposure, mechanism, burden, inequality, and action. Full article

Breast cancer constitutes one of the oncological diagnoses with the greatest impact on women’s lives, with consequences that extend beyond active treatment into a survivorship period marked by profound transformations in identity, relationships, and well-being. This study aimed to explore the impacts that breast cancer produces on the everyday lives of survivor women in the municipality of Villarrica, La Araucanía Region. A qualitative methodology with a phenomenological orientation was employed, based on discourse analysis of three focus groups with 20 female breast cancer survivors between 35 and 70 years old. The analysis identified five categories: impact on everyday life and work, management of uncertainty and fear, transformation of self-care and life priorities, support networks and community, and barriers to accessing the healthcare system. The findings demonstrate the coexistence of posttraumatic growth and persistent psychological distress, together with structural inequities that limit access to comprehensive care during the survivorship period. It is concluded that cancer survivorship demands public policy responses that are continuous, multilevel, and integrative of a gender perspective, articulating individual, family, and community interventions from primary healthcare. Full article

This article examines how gender shapes the framing, governance and lived experience of women’s health within a national health system, and what this reveals about translating gender equality commitments into social policy practice. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, the study combines analysis of national policy documents and parliamentary debates in Portugal (2014–2024) with interviews with key actors (n = 13) and an exploratory national survey of women (n = 268). Across policy and political arenas, women’s health is widely recognised within gender equality and rights-based discourse, yet remains weakly consolidated within mainstream health governance. Reproductive framings dominate, while life-course dimensions such as menopause, women’s mental health and health literacy are under-articulated and weakly operationalised. Actor perspectives emphasise prevention, health literacy, communication and continuity of care, pointing to diffuse ownership and limited accountability. Survey respondents’ accounts both reproduce and extend dominant framings, highlighting mental health, information needs, access barriers and the importance of accessible and trustworthy health information. Reported care experiences reveal a pattern of “respect without responsiveness”, where positive interpersonal treatment coexists with organisational and communicative shortcomings. The article conceptualises this as a governance paradox of recognition without consolidation and shows how policy silences shape not only what becomes actionable within gendered health systems but also the informational conditions that support informed engagement with health and care. The findings have implications for designing life-course-oriented, communication-sensitive and accountability-anchored approaches to women’s health governance. Full article

Cilium is among the most widely deployed Container Network Interfaces (CNIs), serving as the default CNI in the Google Kubernetes Engine. It extends standard Kubernetes NetworkPolicy (KNP) with two additional types—CiliumNetworkPolicy (CNP) and CiliumClusterwideNetworkPolicy (CCNP)—each with distinct semantics. When all three coexist in a cluster, the resulting composition is difficult to reason about formally, leading to misconfiguration and security incidents. Existing verification tools, KANO and VeriKube, address subsets of the problem but share two critical limitations: neither provides a formal denotational semantics that precisely characterizes the three-layer composition, nor a canonical representation enabling policy-equivalence checking with completeness guarantees. We close this gap with three contributions. First, we develop the first formal denotational semantics for Cilium’s three-layer composed policy—KNP (additive), CNP (deny-wins), CCNP (cluster-override)—and prove that the composite function is Hyper-Rectangular Piecewise-Constant (HRPC)-like. Second, we construct a Reduced Ordered Interval Decision Diagram (ROIDD) for the composite policy space and prove a canonicity theorem—canonical for a fixed field order—enabling policy-equivalence checking as structural isomorphism in O(|ROIDD|) time. Third, we develop certified conflict-detection algorithms for shadow, redundancy, and cross-layer conflict anomalies across all three layers with formal proofs of soundness and completeness. Experimental evaluation on synthetic policies confirms zero mismatches between ROIDD evaluation and ground-truth brute force; detection of shadow, redundancy and cross-layer anomalies at precision and recall of 1.000, scored against exhaustive enumeration of the entire packet space; agreement with a live Cilium v1.19.5 data plane on every probe of a scenario built to exercise each clause of the composite semantics; ROIDD compression ratios of 5–15× over the unshared decision tree on the compressed evaluation domain; and low-microsecond (0.74–1.95 µs) per-packet lookup latency that is independent of policy size. A native C++ implementation, evaluated on the same policy dataset, reconstructs the identical decision-diagram structure and classifies each packet in under 60 ns—roughly 30× faster than the Python reference—confirming that sub-microsecond classification is inherent to the algorithm rather than an artifact of the implementation language. Full article

Against the backdrop of climate change and compounded by human activities, increasing water scarcity has triggered a series of drought disasters, which have already severely impacted both ecological environments and socioeconomic production. The SWAT model, recognized for its strong portability and superior spatial heterogeneity, has gained widespread acceptance in fields such as hydrology and environmental science, and is extensively applied in hydrological simulation studies across large-scale river basins. Hydrological models of the study area can be constructed in the SWAT model to simulate changes in hydrological variables by conducting spatial discretization, parameter specification, and boundary condition definition. Standardized drought index can effectively reflect the spatiotemporal variations in drought disasters, holding significant importance for clarifying and predicting drought characteristics. This study took the Luanhe River Basin as the research area, constructed a watershed hydrological model based on SWAT, and projected changes in the basin’s hydrological processes for the period 2030–2060. Based on the model’s projected data, we calculated drought indices and extracted drought events for the basin. The results indicate the following: (1) During the simulation period, only 30% of the years in the Luanhe River basin had annual runoff above the long-term average, with a range of 228.18 mm. The range of mean annual runoff across sub-basins was 173.32 mm. Drought and uneven water resource allocation over both spatial and temporal scales coexisted, and this issue is expected to intensify under future climate warming and drying. (2) The mid-reaches of the Luanhe River are more prone to drought compared to the upper reaches for its higher water demand. However, due to a stronger capacity for ecological restoration, droughts there are mostly of low intensity in the mid-reaches. In contrast, the upper reaches experience more periods classified as severe or extreme drought, and the drought events encountered are generally more intense than those in the mid-reaches. (3) The method proposed in this study can screen extreme drought events based on outliers in the characteristic values of drought events. Taking the simulation from this study as an illustration, anomalies in drought event characteristic values suggest a potential basin-scale, prolonged extreme drought event in the Luanhe River Basin from June 2038 to July 2042. Proactive drought prevention policies should be formulated for this period. The findings of this study provide guiding significance and practical value for drought assessment, risk management, and policy application in the Luanhe River Basin. This study methodologically combines hydrological model predictions with drought event responses, providing a novel method for predicting basin-scale drought conditions and issuing early warnings for extreme drought events. Full article

Composite indicators support policy comparison by compressing multidimensional information, but different indicator configurations can appear similar in aggregate. This study develops and applies a contribution-structure audit to China’s 86 county-level urban-rural integration pilot units. Using 2019–2023 multi-source spatial data, we apply principal component analysis (PCA) to indicators of economic-activity change, built-up expansion, public-service facility nodes, and transport-service nodes. Along the dominant axis, built-up and economic-activity changes oppose facility- and transport-node changes, enabling different indicator configurations to occupy nearby composite positions through compensation. Across all 3655 pairs among the 86 units, composite-position and contribution-structure distances constructed from the same standardized indicators and PCA weights are positively associated (Pearson $r=0.543$), reflecting their internal alignment. The baseline Q25/Q75 same-zone strict screen identifies 11 pairs in which close composite positions coexist with divergent contribution structures. Such pairs also appear in alternative checks that vary screening thresholds, regional composition, POI variables, and distance definitions. Their counts and identities change across specifications. This finding supports inspecting contribution structures when selecting apparently similar cases. For comparative learning among pilot units, the audit identifies cases requiring contextual evidence on institutions, implementation, and outcomes before their experiences are assessed for replication. Full article

Although rooftop greenhouse buildings (RGBs) have become multifunctional urban infrastructures that turn roofs into productive land, their commercial spread across cities remains highly uneven. This study examines that unevenness by reframing RGB diffusion as a land-use transition pathway shaped by the interplay of economic demand pull and institutional readiness. It develops this account as a proposition-generating typology rather than a statistical test. Methodologically, the study combines a qualitative thematic synthesis of the RGB literature with a comparative narrative analysis of seven cities across high- and middle-income tiers: New York, Paris, Singapore, Barcelona, Seoul, Bangkok, and Dhaka. The analysis describes an urban-agriculture intensification ladder on which high-intensity commercial RGBs emerge only above specific wealth thresholds. Linking this economic axis to two institutional channels—legal permanence and administrative agility—we construct a land-use typology in which a commercialization gate separates commercialized from research-stage RGBs. It also reveals South Korea as an institutional paradox, where world-class technology coexists with blocked regulatory channels. We conclude with a development-stage-differentiated, transferable land-use policy framework that helps planning authorities align institutional readiness with economic capacity while proactively mitigating green-equity risks. Full article

Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) is increasingly recognized as the primary governance framework for integrating multiple and often competing maritime activities within shared marine space. This paper examines how the Multi-Use (MU) concept is incorporated into formally adopted MSP frameworks across six Mediterranean EU Member States, namely France, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Slovenia, and Malta. Drawing on content analysis and document analysis of officially approved national plans, the study develops a multi-criteria analytical framework combining conceptual and spatial dimensions to assess MU integration systematically across national contexts. Mediterranean MSP systems are dominated by soft MU forms, particularly combinations involving tourism, fisheries, underwater cultural heritage, and environmental protection, while hard MU configurations involving offshore renewable energy, aquaculture, and shared infrastructure remain largely at the strategic or pilot stage. Four distinct pathways of MU integration are identified: operational, compatibility-based, strategic coexistence, and administrative coexistence. These pathways reflect different approaches to integrating MU within MSP systems, from explicit multi-use promotion to coexistence-oriented planning. They also indicate that the institutional adaptation of marine governance has not progressed as rapidly as technological developments, particularly in relation to emerging MU configurations. Effective MU integration depends less on formal policy recognition and more on the existence of planning instruments, zoning mechanisms, and cross-sectoral governance arrangements capable of translating strategic objectives into operational practice. Full article

Children are a particularly vulnerable group in the global flow of human trafficking and face persistent barriers in accessing justice. This article examines how the United Kingdom (UK) ensures justice for Vietnamese child victims of human trafficking through a three-pillar framework on access to justice: the legal protection framework, the institutional framework, and the capacity to provide and demand effective remedies. Employing a qualitative single-case-study design based on documentary analysis of international human rights instruments, UK legislation, official statistics, policy documents, and peer-reviewed research, the article argues that a progressive legal framework alone does not guarantee substantive access to justice: whether justice is realized depends on the interaction of all three pillars. Framed in rights terms, the failure runs through a sequence of guarantees: the child’s right to be recognized as a victim rather than an offender, their right to be heard in the decisions that follow, and their right to an effective remedy once the harm is done. The UK case, in which a highly developed legal and institutional framework coexists with documented protection failures affecting Vietnamese children, reveals where the gap between formal legal guarantees and substantive justice opens up. On this basis, and with explicit attention to the differences in legal tradition, resources, and institutional structure between the two countries, the article draws policy lessons for Vietnam in implementing its 2024 Law on Prevention and Combat of Human Trafficking. Full article

Brazil’s agricultural sector is characterized by persistent productive duality: a technologically advanced export-oriented segment coexists with a large stratum of smallholders generating low economic returns. Understanding the economic determinants of this gap requires moving beyond individual farm surveys toward systemic, nationally representative evidence. This study examines the socioeconomic drivers of sustainable technology adoption and their effect on the Gross Value of Production (GVP) in Brazilian agriculture, using data from the 2017 Agricultural Census aggregated to 558 micro-regions and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Unlike prior survey-based studies, the census-based approach reduces sample selection bias relative to small-sample surveys and supports a macro-level, ecological analysis grounded in complete census coverage. The structural model explains 69.2% of the variance in technology adoption (R²adj = 0.692) and 47.4% of the variance in GVP (R²adj = 0.474). The results show that rural cooperatives are the dominant institutional mechanism driving both credit access (β = 0.733) and technical assistance (β = 0.746), with effect sizes far exceeding those of individual-level factors. Access to technical information (β = 0.215) and technology adoption itself (β = 0.179) also positively influence GVP. These findings indicate that overcoming productive duality requires a systemic policy approach centered on rural cooperativism, digital connectivity, and institutional capacity. Full article

The Chilean flamingo (Phoenicopterus chilensis) is a widely distributed South American species inhabiting diverse wetland ecosystems from Ecuador and Peru south to Chile and Argentina, and east to Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay, ranging from sea level to high-altitude Andean salars. Despite its broad distribution, local populations are increasingly exposed to anthropogenic pressures, raising conservation concerns at regional scales. In this study, we generated mitogenomic resources and developed a molecular framework for species identification using non-invasive samples. We sequenced genomic DNA from P. chilensis and assembled its complete mitogenome, enabling the in silico evaluation of commonly used metabarcoding markers. Subsequently, we collected eight fecal samples from a feeding site in a high-Andean lagoon where P. chilensis co-occurs with Phoenicoparrus andinus and Phoenicoparrus jamesi. As a positive control, nine additional fecal samples were collected from the Zoológico Nacional, Santiago, Chile, where only P. chilensis is maintained. DNA was extracted and initially screened via Sanger sequencing. To robustly assign taxonomic identity, we implemented a probabilistic framework combining maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference to estimate the posterior probability of species membership based on observed genetic variants. This approach revealed the presence of two genetically distinct groups not attributable to P. chilensis, indicating the coexistence and detectability of other flamingo taxa through fecal DNA. Our results demonstrate the value of integrating mitogenomic resources, metabarcoding, and statistical inference for non-invasive species identification in mixed-species systems. This framework provides a scalable tool for biodiversity monitoring and has direct implications for conservation strategies and evidence-based policy development in fragile high-Andean ecosystems. Full article

Computer virus propagation (CVP) models translate malware movement in a network into analyzable dynamical systems. Two features are especially important for modern networks: infected hosts may remain latent before a damaging burst, and infection efficiency is usually saturated by limited contacts, filtering, isolation, or response resources. This article develops a two-dimensional Caputo fractional susceptible–latent–bursting–susceptible (SLBS) CVP model in which the susceptible–latent and susceptible–bursting channels have different Holling type-II incidence functions. The fractional derivative represents memory effects in the propagation process, while the two incidence functions allow the latent and bursting stages to have separate transmission strengths and saturation levels. Non-negativity, boundedness, and well-posedness are established. The system is then used to derive the basic reproduction number, classify all endemic equilibria, and obtain local asymptotic stability criteria for the virus-free, latency-free burst-endemic, and latency–burst coexistence equilibria. Numerical simulations based on an Adams predictor–corrector scheme illustrate the theoretical thresholds and suggest global convergence in representative parameter regions. The results provide a stage-sensitive modeling tool for analyzing and designing targeted defense policies against computer virus outbreaks. Full article